Evangelicals and COVID
To communities across the world, the COVID-19 pandemic presents an existential threat. It has killed millions and irreparably damaged the lives of many times that. It has wiped away billions of businesses and imposed unprecedented financial devastation. It has changed the way all of us live our lives. But luckily, there is now widespread expert consensus on how to stop it: vaccinations, masking, and social distancing. If we want to tame this virus and get things back to relative normalcy, these are the things we all need to be doing. But there is one group of Americans standing in the way of this more than any other: white evangelical Christians.
A Pew Research Center survey conducted in February found that 45% of white evangelicals refused to get a COVID-19 vaccine - the highest by far of any demographic group surveyed. Given that evangelicals represent a full quarter of the population, 75% of which are white, if these views don’t change this alone will prevent the United States from ever reaching herd immunity. Jamie Aten, executive director at evangelical Wheaton College, says “If we can’t get a significant number of white evangelicals to come around on this, the pandemic is going to last much longer than it needs to.” The longer it lasts, the more opportunity it has to mutate, possibly to the point where it can evade our vaccines altogether.
Reasons given by evangelicals for refusing vaccines include (1) vaccines are made from aborted fetal tissue (false); (2) coronavirus vaccinations represent the “mark of the beast” – a symbol of submission to the Antichrist found in biblical prophecies, Revelation 13:18 (um . . .); and (3) Christians are less afraid of COVID-19 because they believe in eternal life, an explanation given by Mississippi governor Tate Reeves. Sister Deirdre Byrne, who spoke at last year’s Republican National Convention, said the vaccines are “diabolic” and claimed the fight against them is a “battle between Our Lord and the devil.” These reasons trigger strong emotional responses and are not of the type one can easily address by more facts and data.
White evangelicals are also the least likely to social distance, wear masks, or vaccinate their children. Liberty University, an evangelical school in Virginia, is under a temporary campus-wide Covid-19 quarantine following a sharp spike in cases after it lifted building capacity restrictions, distancing, and masking requirements for the fall. Unsurprisingly, unlike many other colleges, Liberty doesn’t require vaccination. Tony Spell, a minister at the Life Tabernacle Church in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, defied authorities in holding mass church gatherings even after the state deemed them illegal stating, “We’re anti-mask, anti-social distancing, and anti-vaccine.” Numerous COVID outbreaks and deaths have been tied to services by churches like Mr. Spell’s or church camps and conferences defying social distancing and mask mandates.
Evangelicals appear to be coalescing around an anti-mask, anti-vaccine platform communicated to millions through their extensive radio network. Radio host Jimmy DeYoung called masks and vaccines “government control” before contracting and dying of COVID in August. Another evangelical host, Phil Valentine, also died of COVID in August -- after comparing hospital workers who had to display their vaccine status to Jews wearing yellow stars in Nazi Germany. Two more conservative hosts who mocked vaccines, Marc Bernier and Dick Farrel, died of COVID in August of 2021 as well. Unfortunately, these deaths did not discourage other evangelical hosts from their anti-mask, anti-vaccine crusade. Gene Bailey, the host of a prophecy-focused talk show on the Victory Channel, warned his audience that the government and “globalist entities” will “use bayonets and prisons to force a needle into your arm.” There are reasons to believe the wagons are circling in the world of Christian radio, and dissent on these issues may no longer be tolerated. On August 27, 2021, the National Religious Broadcasters association fired its senior vice president of communications, Daniel Darling, because he appeared on television to discuss why he got vaccinated and to allay Christian fears about the vaccine.
It is important to note that no major religious groups in the United States are officially telling people not to get vaccinated or wear masks. At the highest levels, the messages are consistently positive. The National Association of Evangelicals and Pope Francis have both voiced their support for vaccination efforts. Even Christian Scientists — the religious group perhaps most doctrinally opposed to modern medical treatment — have encouraged members to “cooperate with measures considered necessary by public health officials.” Orthodox Jewish and Muslim leaders, as well as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, have also voiced their support for the vaccines.
So why are so many evangelical Christians on the ground opposed to these measures? I believe it is a combination of politics and a culture that has grown to see science and secular institutions generally as their enemies. Since the 1980s, evangelical Christians have grown increasingly associated with the Republican party. In 2016, evangelicals flocked to candidate Donald Trump, and after he was elected, became even more closely tied to Trump’s unique brand of Republicanism. In many ways, Trump represented a cult of personality, which the Republican party came increasingly to reflect. Ultimately, the party’s platform became whatever Trump said it was.
When Trump, Fox News, and the Republican party began undermining mask mandates and vaccines, evangelical Christians who looked to them for authority followed along. They took other right-wing claims at face value as well. For example, a majority of white evangelicals believe the 2020 election was stolen and government is run by the “deep state.” 25% believe this deep state to be a group of Satan-worshipping child sex traffickers. With so many evangelicals adopting such easily falsified beliefs, it is no surprise they would be taken in by false beliefs about vaccines as well.
But there is more to it than this, for even before President Trump, evangelical Christians as a group were significantly more skeptical of vaccines and science generally. Elaine Ecklund, professor of sociology and director of the Religion and Public Life Program at Rice University, says there has been a “sea change” over the past century in how evangelical Christians see science, a change rooted largely in the debates over evolution and the perceived secularization of academia. She says distrust of scientists has become part of their cultural identity, of what it means to be white and evangelical in America. In an article for Salon, Christian pastor Nathanial Manderson said:
Unfortunately for my fellow Christians, [unwillingness to engage with information that threatens one’s beliefs] is a major part of church history and the current Christian culture. This close-minded approach has been on full display during this pandemic of the unvaccinated. From Darwin to COVID the church has been wrong. It's really about fear among the Christian faithful when they turn away from science. Even scientific theory is dismissed out of hand by the church because of a fear that somehow science will prove that God does not exist. As the pandemic spreads from one church to another and global warming continues to be ignored by the evangelical movement, it is clear that practitioners of the current Christian faith have not evolved from their ancestors who condemned Galileo and Darwin. This is why it has been so difficult to get evangelicals to accept things proven by the scientific community. . . .When science becomes the enemy, something like a vaccine cannot be trusted — because it was created by the same people that are trying to destroy God. This brings us to the COVID vaccines and the fact that evangelicals have a culture and a long history of rejecting science. Somehow this vaccine has become a symbol of government overreach, but what's even more important to evangelicals is the idea that science is telling people of faith what is true. https://www.salon.com/2021/08/28/evangelicals-science-and-the-vaccine-refusal-is-built-on-deep-seated-fear/
The impact of American evangelical viewpoints isn’t limited to America. Curtis Chang, consulting professor at Duke Divinity School leading an outreach project to educate evangelicals on the vaccine, said he recently spoke with a colleague in Uganda whose hospital had received 5,000 vaccine doses but had only been able to administer about 400 because of the hesitancy of the heavily evangelical population. “How American evangelicals think, write, feel about issues quickly replicates throughout the entire world,” he said.
Beyond evangelicals refusing to wear masks or get vaccinated, however, is a new concern. Following a long-term strategy of obtaining Christian privileges under the guise of “religious freedom,” American evangelicals have begun pushing for, and obtaining, religious exemptions from government and private employer health measures such as vaccine and mask mandates. Churches in Los Angeles California defied the state and county social distancing orders and successfully sued. Destiny, a mega-church in Rocklin California has already issued more than 3,000 exemptions to anyone that wants to avoid getting vaccinated, increasingly mandated by California employers, and plans to provide them at its weekly services to anyone that asks.
Exemptions such as these are supposed to be based on one’s “sincere religious beliefs” – meaning, for example, that being vaccinated directly contradicts a specific religious belief they firmly hold. In practice, this can be virtually impossible to challenge since it requires proving a negative. Another difficulty is that the belief may be based on false information. People may sincerely believe vaccines are demonic, made from aborted fetuses, or contain microchips implanted by Bill Gates to control them. None of this need be true or based on remotely plausible evidence. The only thing required is that someone say “I believe it.”
As well-meaning as these exemptions may once have been, they now represent a loophole so potentially large as to effectively negate any attempts to control the virus. Speaking of these exemptions, evangelical Christian commentator David French acknowledged: “[T]he remaining vaccine holdouts are growing more extreme, and significant parts of the Christian Right are enabling, excusing, and validating Evangelical behavior that is gravely wrong and dangerous to the lives and health of their fellow citizens.”
I am genuinely happy that the major Christian denominations have officially supported the efforts of the scientific and medical communities in combatting COVID-19. But I share the concern of Mr. French and many others that the concerted efforts of many in the evangelical Christian community threaten not only the progress we need to make, but the progress we have already made.